Democracy and the political : consensus and conflict in Hannah Arendt and Chantal Mouffe

Abstract

Almost seventy years have passed since the publication of Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism which sought to provide a coherent definition of totalitarianism and a conception of democratic politics that might avoid it. Since then, times have dramatically changed as the very democratic project that Arendt proposed to avoid totalitarianism is in crisis. Democracy itself is under considerable strain and has the potential to descend into totalitarianism. Whether we think about it in terms of representative, direct, or council forms, democracy requires consensus on the institutions and juridical norms that govern the citizens of the state. However, insofar as it seems to rely on majoritarianism, democracy has the potential to curtail the sphere of the political or collapse political difference into a homogenous whole. This prompts us to rethink how consensus is achieved in a democracy. This dissertation precisely explores that, namely, how we can achieve consensus without exclusion. On the one hand, Hannah Arendt proposes a theory of democracy guided by deliberation and the exchange of opinion. While there is a discrepancy in the literature on Arendt whether she is endorsing an agonistic or a deliberative variation of democracy, theorists generally agree that she advocates for the latter. On the other hand, Chantal Mouffe believes that Arendt fails to recognise that social relations are inherently antagonistic. While democracy requires consensus on the ethico-political principles, this consensus allows for contestation and conflict before and after consensus has been achieved. This dissertation defends Mouffe's account of agonistic pluralism, which is one variation of radical democracy as it secures the space of the political. However, it argues that while radical democracy secures the space of the political, theorists of radical democracy need to reflect more extensively on constitutionalism, specifically, how they demarcate between the game of agonistic democratic contest, on the one hand, and the fundamental rules of that game that all political actors must abide by, on the other hand. This can be achieved through embedding radical democracy into a constitutional framework. For some time now, theorists of democratic theory have posited that radical democracy must take the form of constituent politics - that is, it must be embedded in a constitutional framework. For them, a government "of the people, by the people and for the people" requires fundamental rules that cannot be altered through the "normal" democratic political process.

Date of Award	2021
Original language	English